The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the prosecution of a Texas man on charges of purchasing a firearm while consuming marijuana Thursday, weakening a federal law used to convict former first son Hunter Biden.
In a unanimous ruling written by Republican-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, the high court agreed that the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani violated his Second Amendment rights.
The court did not address the question of whether addicts who were currently intoxicated could purchase a firearm or whether any person under the influence of marijuana could be deemed too dangerous to posses a gun.
The justices also didn’t outright strike down the law, which was used to prosecute the younger Biden for purchasing a firearm while addicted to cocaine.
“We appreciate that drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
“…[T]he government cannot carry the burden it has set for itself. We decide cases ‘based on the historical record,’” he added. “And the habitual drunkard laws on which the government relies here differ dramatically from [the statute in question’s] unlawful user provision on every single metric the government invites us to consider.”
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both penned concurring opinions, with the latter joined by liberal Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed to the court by then-President Joe Biden, also wrote a concurrence backed by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor.
FBI agents had searched the home of Hemani, a dual citizen of the US and Pakistan, in 2022 under the suspicion that some of his family members were involved in “terrorism-related activities.”
Investigators ended up uncovering a handgun and marijuana that Hemani admitted he used “about every other day.” --->READ MORE HERE
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| Noah Wulf/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 |
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held on Thursday that the federal government’s use of a federal law restricting gun possession for certain unlawful drug users to be “inconsistent with the Second Amendment.”
“The Second Amendment protects the right of ‘all Americans’ to keep and bear firearms for self defense,” the court’s “narrow” ruling reads. “Affording the government ‘broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun’ would risk allowing it to ‘quickly swallow’ the Second Amendment.”
Known as U.S. v. Hemani, the case centers around the government’s prosecution of Ali Hemani, a Texas resident who was charged under a provision (18 U.S. Code § 922(g)(3)) of the 1968 Gun Control Act that prohibits a person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing a firearm. Hemani is admittedly a regular marijuana user.
The statute was previously used to indict Hunter Biden several years ago.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted how the government sought to use the statute to “automatically strip” Hemani of his Second Amendment rights “because he uses marijuana a few times a week.” In seeking to advance this “expansive theory,” the administration urged the court to “draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards,” which it argued “demonstrate a tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing.”
“But the government’s analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider,” Gorsuch wrote. “The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways. And faced with all these shortcomings in the government’s submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hemani complies with the Second Amendment.” --->READ MORE HERE
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